Filing Cabinet Quotes

But the plans were on display…” “On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them.” “That’s the display department.” “With a flashlight.” “Ah, well, the lights had probably gone.” “So had the stairs.” “But look, you found the notice, didn’t you?” “Yes,” said Arthur, “yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard.

I'd love to know how Dad saw me when I was 6. I'd love to know a hundred things. When a parent dies, a filing cabinet full of all the fascinating stuff also ceases to exist. I never imagined how hungry I'd be one day to look inside it.

My head was once a filing cabinet. Now it’s a flurry of papers, floating on a draft.

E!" Klaus cried. "E as in Exit!" The Baudelaires ran down E as in Exit, but when they reached the last cabinet, the row was becoming F as in Falling File Cabinets, G as in Go the Other Way! and H as in How in the World Are We Going to Escape?

But I didn't frame it; I put into an envelope and sealed it and stuffed it far back into a corner drawer of a filing cabinet. It's there, just in case one of these days I start to lose her. There might be a morning when I wake up and her face isn't the first thing I see. Or a lazy August afternoon when I can't quite recall anymore where the freckles were on her right shoulders. Maybe one of these days, I will not be able to listen to the sound of snow falling and hear her footsteps.

Her brain is like a filing cabinet – everything neatly stored in categories. My brain is more like soup – everything all blended and mushed together.

I'm so excited. I just bought a new file cabinet, some manila folders, some sticky note pads, and a few highlighters, and I think I'm finally ready to enter into organized crime.

So I stuck that in the back of my mental filing cabinet too, under the drawer labeled: Unthinkable.

You think he left a big flashing arrow pointing to a filing cabinet labeled 'Evidence Here!'? He's a Stray, Ethan, not Wile E. Coyote!

She hated official letters. They made her feel nervous. The people who wrote them sounded like they had filing cabinets where their hearts should be.

I’d love to know how Dad saw me when I was a kid. I’d love to know a hundred things. When a parent dies, a filing cabinet full of all the fascinating stuff also ceases to exist. I never imagined how hungry I’d be one day to look inside it.

Your eyes is camera and your brain is a file cabinet.

George looked around the office. Five dirty and chipped desks, one with a missing leg held upright with a stack of out-of-date telephone books, a two-year out-of-date calendar, a filing cabinet overflowing with case notes, four chairs all with tears in the fabric, and a printer that hadn’t worked since, well since ever – having no print cartridges was obviously an issue.

I couldn't keep my eyes off of her when she was leaning over to open a file drawer. I'd purposely moved all of the expense files to the bottom drawer of the filing cabinet in my office for that very reason.

I was shameless in my supermarket-shelf mass-market taste. I loved King, Evanovich, Grisham and Brown. I won't lie; the oficial-looking filing cabinet in the corner is actually stuffed full of my paperbacks.

Well … when we were in our first year, Harry — young, carefree, and innocent —” Harry snorted. He doubted whether Fred and George had ever been innocent. “— well, more innocent than we are now — we got into a spot of bother with Filch.” “We let off a Dungbomb in the corridor and it upset him for some reason —” “So he hauled us off to his office and started threatening us with the usual —” “— detention —” “— disembowelment —” “— and we couldn’t help noticing a drawer in one of his filing cabinets marked Confiscated and Highly Dangerous.” “Don’t tell me —” said Harry, starting to grin. “Well, what would you’ve done?” said Fred. “George caused a diversion by dropping another Dungbomb, I whipped the drawer open, and grabbed — this.” “It’s not as bad as it sounds, you know,” said George. “We don’t reckon Filch ever found out how to work it. He probably suspected what it was, though, or he wouldn’t have confiscated it.” “And you know how to work it?” “Oh yes,” said Fred, smirking. “This little beauty’s taught us more than all the teachers in this school.” “You’re winding me up,” said Harry, looking at the ragged old bit of parchment. “Oh, are we?” said George. He took out his wand, touched the parchment lightly, and said, “I solemnly swear that I am up to no good.

The town office building has a giant filing cabinet full of death certificates that say choked to death on his own anger or suffocated from unexpressed feelings of unhappiness.

There were no walls. No stupid file cabinets, Nothing between me and everything I felt. Nothing between me and all that Zayne was. Which was more. So much more.

When a parent dies, a filing cabinet full of all the fascinating stuff also ceases to exist.

Writers live with fear. Some writers cannot deal with the fear, and so they quit or refuse to publish. In order to write, you must either ignore the fear or trick it into leaving you alone. The fear is very sly, though and hard to trick. The fear in writing comes from exposing your thoughts, your emotions, your experiences, your ideas, your talent, your intelligence and ultimately your self to public scrutiny and possible scorn. The fear is by no means groundless. You have opened yourself up to the possibility of public humiliations...I sometimes wonder if perhaps the greatest novel ever written isn't gathering dust in some filing cabinet somewhere, simply because its author could not overcome the fear of having it published.

When a parent dies, a filing cabinet full of all the fascinating stuff also ceases to exist. I never imagined how hungry I’d be one day to look inside it.

You don’t understand,” getting mad. “You guys, you’re like Puritans are about the Bible. So hung up with words, words. You know where that play exists, not in that file cabinet, not in any paperback you’re looking for, but—” a hand emerged from the veil of shower-steam to indicate his suspended head—“in here. That’s what I’m for. To give the spirit flesh. The words, who cares? They’re rote noises to hold line bashes with, to get past the bone barrier around an actor’s memory, right? But the reality is in this head. Mine. I’m the projector at the planetarium, all the closed little universe visible in the circle of that stage is coming out of my mouth, eyes, sometimes other orifices also.

So a dog's value came from the training AND the breeding. And by breeding, Edgar supposed he meant both the bloodlines - the particular dogs in their ancestry - and all the information in the file cabinets. Because the files, with their photographs, measurements, notes, charts, cross-references, and scores, told the STORY of the dog - what a MEANT as his father put it.

The three of us stood there for a minute. I don’t know what Stew was thinking, and the filing cabinet wasn’t thinking anything. But I was thinking, is this the world? Is this really the place in which you’ve ended up, Snicket? It was a question that struck me, as it might strike you, when something ridiculous was going on, or something sad. I wondered if this was really where I should be, or if there was another world someplace, less ridiculous and less sad. But I never knew the answer to the question. Perhaps I had been in another world before I was born, and did not remember it, or perhaps I would see another world when I died, which I was in no hurry to do. In the meantime, I was stuck in the police station, doing something so ridiculous it felt sad, and feeling so sad it was ridiculous. The world of the police station, the world of Stain’d-by-the-Sea and all of the wrong questions I was asking, was was the only world I could see.

The true nature of bureaucracy may be nowhere more obvious to the observer than in a developing country, for only there will it still be made manifest by the full complement of documents, files, veneered desks and cabinets - which convey the strict and inverse relationship between productivity and paperwork.

The first I knew about it was when a workman arrived at my home yesterday. I asked him if he'd come to clean the windows and he said no, he'd come to demolish the house. He didn't tell me straight away of course. Oh no. First he wiped a couple of windows and charged me a fiver. Then he told me." "But Mr. Dent, the plans have been available in the local planning office for the last nine months." "Oh yes, well, as soon as I heard I went straight round to see them, yesterday afternoon. You hadn't exactly gone out of your way to call attention to them, had you? I mean, like actually telling anybody or anything." "But the plans were on display..." "On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them." "That's the display department." "With a flashlight." "Ah, well, the lights had probably gone." "So had the stairs." "But look, you found the notice didn't you?" "Yes," said Arthur, "yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying 'Beware of the Leopard.

All humans are filing cabinets,” she said finally. “Some are just better organized than others.

The whole calamity would be in one of those police reports that D. B. Sinclair and his "concerned citizens" filed carefully under "T" for "Things" at the back of a locked filing cabinet in the vehicle-licensing centre a day before a bonfire got accidentally out of control.

I love having pockets on jeans. They're wearable filing cabinets, and if I didn't have them I don't know where I'd keep my important paperwork, like tax documents or lists of clever duck puns.

But then suddenly there was no place higher to go. I felt my cracked lips stretch into a painful grin. I was on top of the Devil's Thumb. Fittingly, the summit was a surreal, malevolent place, an improbably slender wedge of rock and rime no wider than a file cabinet. It did not encourage loitering. As I straddled the highest point, the south face fell away beneath my right boot for twenty-five hundred feet; beneath my left boot the north face dropped twice that distance.

And I realized something I never had before. Deep down, I want to be seen as an object too. I want to be coveted and sought after. I want to be taken apart and understood, reassembled, filed away in Didier's cabinet. I don't even need to be pretty to have this. I only have to allow him to open me up.

I knew she loved sushi because it was neat and easy to eat on the go. I knew she preferred double cheeseburgers when she was on her period and steak, medium rare, at client dinners unless her client was vegetarian, in which case she ordered soup and salad. She liked her wine white, her coffee black, and her gin with a splash of tonic. I knew all of these things because despite her assumption that I paid attention to no one except myself, I couldn’t stop noticing her if my life depended on it. Every detail, every moment, all filed and categorized in the Sloane cabinet of my mind.

Did I need medication? Or did I need someone to talk to? Someone, that is, who would do more than charge the going rate for nodding and whip out a prescription pad before the first fifty minutes were up. Was I physiologically depressed? At an innate biochemical disadvantage? Or was reaching for the pad just the way things were done because the doc had been well patronized by the drug reps and had plenty of samples in her file cabinet?

As everyone from ancient times till today knows, clerks and accountants think in a non-human fashion. They think like filing cabinets. This is not their fault. If they don’t think that way their drawers will all get mixed up and they won’t be able to provide the services their government, company or organisation requires.

​The more we believe about something, the more we will accept other ideas that are similar. The more files we have in our mental filing cabinets, which tell us something about ourselves, the more we will attract and accept other thoughts and ideas which support and prove what is already stored in our files. The more you think about yourself in a certain way, the more you will think about yourself in that same certain way. The more you think about anything in a certain way, the more you will believe that that is how it really is.

Trials of a person I didn't know lost in a labyrinth of aisles formed by the immense filing cabinets of Brazil - the movie, not the country.

My mind is a filing cabinet that someone dumped on the floor.

It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard.’ 

Home was a condominium on the fifteenth floor of a high-rise, a sort of filing cabinet for widows and young professionals.

I have a little cabinet letter file on my desk that is just in front of me. I was thinking and wondering about a title for the story, and had settled on the ‘Wizard’ as part of it. My gaze was caught by the gilt letters on the three drawers of the cabinet. The first was A-G; the next drawer was labelled H-N; and on the last were the letters O-Z. And Oz it at once became.

For most of the past century, your odds of being killed by a cougar were about the same as your odds of being killed by a filing cabinet. Snowplows kill twice as many Canadians as grizzly bears do.

Each of us is a museum that opens for business the moment we’re born, with memory the sole curator. How could a staff of one possibly stay abreast of all those holdings? No sooner does a moment occur than it’s relegated to the past, requiring that it be labeled, sorted, and filed into the appropriate cabinet.

But look, you found the notice, didn’t you?” “Yes,” said Arthur, “yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard.

She's going to see how bare the house is. How bleak. They don't own much, just useful furniture and filing cabinets of music. No decorations. His family collects bruises and German insults instead of crockery and photo frames.

No! The E aisle!" "B?" Violet asked, finding it difficult to hear over the sounds of the cabinets. "E!" Klaus cried. "E as in Exit!" The Baudelaires ran down E as in Exit, but when they reached the last cabinet, the row was becoming F as in Falling File Cabinets, G as in Go the Other Way! and H as in How in the World Are We Going to Escape?

The brain, you see, is not a computer, despite oft repeated claims to the contrary. The brain is a living thing; much like an overgrown garden than an orderly filing cabinet. And mind wandering through your own garden of thoughts, memories, feelings and desires is a sure way to discover your inner creative self.

Terms swarm up to tempt me in the course of this description: Greek Orthodox, Romanesque, flying buttress, etc. These guessing words I find junked in my brain in deranged juxtaposition, like files randomly stuffed into cabinets by a dispirited secretary with no notion of what, if anything, might ever be usefully retrieved. Often all language seems this way: a monstrous compendium of embedded histories I’m helpless to understand. I employ it the way a dog drives a car, without grasping how the car came to exist or what makes a combustion engine possible. That is, of course, if dogs drove cars. They don’t. Yet I go around forming sentences.

this was not about being forgotten. This was about being in a file cabinet with my name on it and they closed the door. I was a corpse with a tag on my toe. A

...to rows of refrigerated lockers, to the dreamless cabinet used for the filing of sightless eyes.

In order to function, the people who operate such a system of drawers must be reprogrammed to stop thinking as humans and to start thinking as clerks and accountants. As everyone from ancient times till today knows, clerks and accountants think in a non-human fashion. They think like filing cabinets. This is not their fault. If they don’t think that way their drawers will all get mixed up and they won’t be able to provide the services their government, company or organisation requires. The most important impact of script on human history is precisely this: it has gradually changed the way humans think and view the world. Free association and holistic thought have given way to compartmentalisation and bureaucracy.

A “file” was originally—in sixteenth-century England—a wire on which slips and bills and notes and letters could be strung for preservation and reference. Then came file folders, file drawers, and file cabinets; then the electronic namesakes of all these; and the inevitable irony. Once a piece of information is filed, it is statistically unlikely ever to be seen again by human eyes.

I saw my father’s wooden filing cabinet, his framed diplomas stacked on top of it, just as they’d been brought from his office. In that cabinet lay records of the colds, cut fingers, cancers, broken bones, mumps, diphtheria, births and deaths of a large part of Mill Valley for over two generations. Half the patients listed in those files were dead now, the wounds and tissue my father had treated only dust.

Don’t you let them forget about you,” she said. But this was not about being forgotten. This was about being in a file cabinet with my name on it and they closed the door. I was a corpse with a tag on my toe.

In a special file cabinet drawer or dedicated file box, keep six file folders for each high-school student. Label them: Course Descriptions Books Read Papers Written Recommendations Extracurricular Activities Other

But the plans were on display . . .’ ‘On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them.’ ‘That’s the display department.’ ‘With a torch.’ ‘Ah, well the lights had probably gone.’ ‘So had the stairs.’ ‘But look, you found the notice, didn’t you?’ ‘Yes,’ said Arthur, ‘yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying Beware of the Leopard.

By Monday afternoon it was as if the hiatus of the last month had never occurred. Ten crates unloading, nine boxes opened, eight phones ringing, seven staff complaining, six desks in various states of assembly, five damaged chairs, four cases pending, three workmen hammering, two computers crashing and a cat locked in a filing cabinet with no key. Arthur Bryant was sitting back at his desk, beaming amidst the chaos, looking for all the world as if he had never left.

Even if, at the moment, you can't sit down and do the gruntwork of stringing verbs and nouns together, you are writing. It is a way of seeing, a way of being. The world is not only the world, but your personal filing cabinet. You lodge details of the world in your sparkling nerve-library that spirals through your brain and coils down your arms and legs, collects in your belly and your sex. You write, even if you can't always "write." However, writers write. Active, not passive.

[B]ut once the bureaucrats sink their barbed pens into the lives of Indians, the paper starts flying, a blizzard of legal forms, a waste of ink by the gallon, a correspondence to which there is no end or reason. That's when I began to see what we were becoming, and the years have borne me out: a tribe of file cabinets and triplicates, a tribe of single-space documents, directives, policy. A tribe of pressed trees. A tribe of chicken-scratch that can be scattered by a wind, diminished to ashes by one struck match.

In the 1992 election, Mr. Clinton raised discrete fortunes from a gorgeous mosaic of diversity and correctness. From David Mixner and the gays he wrung immense sums on the promise of lifting the ban on homosexual service in “the military”—a promise he betrayed with his repellent “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy. From a variety of feminist circles he took even larger totals for what was dubbed “The Year of the Woman,” while he and his wife applauded Anita Hill for her bravery in “speaking out” about funny business behind the file cabinets.

For half the young men, that was it. They were the control group. For the other half, there was a catch. As they walked down the hallway with their questionnaire, a man—a confederate of the experimenters—walked past them and pulled out a drawer in one of the filing cabinets. The already narrow hallway now became even narrower. As the young men tried to squeeze by, the confederate looked up, annoyed. He slammed the filing cabinet drawer shut, jostled the young men with his shoulder, and, in a low but audible voice, said the trigger word: “Asshole.” Cohen and Nisbett wanted to measure, as precisely as possible, what being called that word meant. They looked at the faces of their subjects and rated how much anger they saw. They shook the young men’s hands to see if their grip was firmer than usual. They took saliva samples from the students, both before and after the insult, to see if being called an asshole caused their levels of testosterone and cortisol—the hormones that drive arousal and aggression—to go up. Finally they asked the students to read the following story and supply a conclusion: It had only been about twenty minutes since they had arrived at the party when Jill pulled Steve aside, obviously bothered about something. “What’s wrong?” asked Steve. “It’s Larry. I mean, he knows that you and I are engaged, but he’s already made two passes at me tonight.” Jill walked back into the crowd, and Steve decided to keep his eye on Larry. Sure enough, within five minutes, Larry was reaching over and trying to kiss Jill. If you’ve been insulted, are you more likely to imagine Steve doing something violent to Larry?

When people run for their lives they frequently neglect to bring along their file cabinets of evidence,” she said. Mattie wasn’t often bitter but when she was, she was. I didn’t want to believe the world could be so unjust. But of course it was right there in front of my nose.

Sisters of the torn shirts. Sisters of the chase around the desk, casting couch, hotel room, file cabinet. Sisters dragging shattered dreams, bruised hopes, ambitions abandoned in the dirt. Sisters fishing one by one in the lake of shame. Hooks baited with fear always come back empty. Truth dawns slow when you've been beaten and lied to, but it burns hard and bright once it wakes. Sisters, drop everything. Walk away from the lake, leaning on each other's shoulders when you need the support. Feel the contractions of another truth ready to be born. Shame turned inside out is rage.

The brain, you see, is not a computer, despite oft-repeated claims to the contrary. The brain is a living thing, much more like an overgrown garden than an orderly filing cabinet. And mind-wandering through your own garden of thoughts, memories, feelings, and desires is a sure way to discover your inner creative self. Science backs this up. Mind wandering is directly linked to enhanced creativity. The more your mind wanders, the greater the connections seen between far-flung areas of the brain on MRI exams. Daydreamers are not only more creative, they’ve even been shown to be smarter on certain tests,

Jude, typically an orderly person, regularly notes that they need to invest in a filing cabinet, or at the very least start throwing things out, but Irene has always registered a low note of panic at the thought of getting rid of any possessions. She is prone to treasuring her most trivial items, ticket stubs from the ferry, old water bills, books she didn’t really like. This is never so much in the belief that they’ll one day come in handy as that the act of throwing them out will somehow trigger their long-withheld purpose, a sudden and obvious use revealing itself only as she watches the item fall from her hands.

Oh yes, well as soon as I heard I went straight round to see them, yesterday afternoon. You hadn’t exactly gone out of your way to call attention to them, had you? I mean like actually telling anybody or anything.’ ‘But the plans were on display . . .’ ‘On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them.’ ‘That’s the display department.’ ‘With a torch.’ ‘Ah, well the lights had probably gone.’ ‘So had the stairs.’ ‘But look, you found the notice, didn’t you?’ ‘Yes,’ said Arthur, ‘yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying Beware of the Leopard.

Frank recoiled. The back of his head struck the file cabinet crammed in behind his desk. One thought—irrelevant but very clear—filled his mind: the news network had bleeped out motherfucker but had permitted America to see a woman tear off a goodly portion of her husband’s nose. Something in those priorities was badly screwed up.

That’s when I got the first real tingle of warning. Small, but serious. The smart thing to do would have been to simply end the call. No goodbyes, no polite refusals, just hit the button, put the cell phone in the bottom drawer of my file cabinet, and go to the multiplex to watch a movie about things blowing up. Maybe get some Ben and Jerry’s afterward.

I love you, Kayla Martin. I want to spend the rest of my life wondering what will happen when I turn on the microwave. I want to explain the X-files to you in bed every night and replace cabinet doors that are dented from your feet.....I want to go to sleep at night knowing that you're puttering around in the other room inventing something that will baffle and confuse me.

Faint traces of other black churches are tucked away in handwritten ledgers at the state archives at Morrow; in the collections at the University of Georgia in Athens; even in the basement of the Forsyth courthouse, where a cardboard box atop a metal filing cabinet still holds deeds for the land on which black residents once founded Mt. Fair, Shakerag, and Stoney Point - about which nothing is known but names and approximate locations. All that can be said for certain is that, again and again in the fall of 1912, white men sloshed gasoline and kerosene onto the benches and wooden floors of such rooms, then backed out into the dark, tossing lit matches as they went. All over the county, beneath the ground on which black churches stood, the soil is rich with ashes.

What am I doing here?” she demanded, bewildered. “You’re having dinner,” her little brother said. “Stop it! I’m not hungry. Stop it!” John held the spoon in front of her. His cherubic face was dark with anger. “You said you wouldn’t leave me.” “What are you talking about?” Mary demanded. “You said you wouldn’t do it. You wouldn’t leave me alone,” John said. “But you tried, didn’t you?” “I don’t know what you’re babbling about.” She noticed Astrid then, leaning against a filing cabinet. Astrid looked like she’d been dragged through the middle of a dog fight. Little Pete was sitting cross-legged, rocking back and forth. He was chanting, “Good-bye, Nestor. Good-bye, Nestor.” “Mary, you have an eating disorder,” Astrid said. “The secret is out. So cut the crap.” “Eat,” John ordered, and shoved a spoonful of food in her mouth. None too gently. “Swallow,” John ordered. “Let me—” “Shut up, Mary.

Back in the day, physicians had to go through filing cabinets to find records and write notes and prescriptions by hand. Back in the day, office clerks had to run around the office with paper reports to track down their bosses for their approval. Back in the day, farmers planted by hand and harvested with sickles. What do these people have to whine about these days? No one is insensitive enough to say that. Every field has its technological advances and evolves in the direction that reduces the amount of physical labour required, but people are particularly reluctant to admit that the same is true for domestic labour. Since she became a full-time housewife, she often noticed that there was a polarised attitude regarding domestic labour. Some demeaned it as "bumming around at home", while others glorified it as "work that sustains life", but none tried to calculate its monetary value. Probably because the moment you put a price on something, someone has to pay.

This is what the art of memory was ultimately most useful for. It was not merely a tool for recording but also a tool of invention and composition. “The realization that composing depended on a well-furnished and securely available memory formed the basis of rhetorical education in antiquity,” writes Mary Carruthers. Brains were as organized as modern filing cabinets, with important facts, quotations, and ideas stuffed into neat mnemonic cubbyholes, where they would never go missing, and where they could be recombined and strung together on the fly. The goal of training one’s memory was to develop the capacity to leap from topic to topic and make new connections between old ideas. “As an art, memory was most importantly associated in the Middle Ages with composition, not simply with retention,” argues Carruthers. “Those who practiced the crafts of memory used them—as all crafts are used—to make new things: prayers, meditations, sermons, pictures, hymns, stories, and poems.

she wrote out an incident report. "Yes, Mr. Lemon. I agree. Those teenagers should not have positioned your garden gnomes like that. Yes. I do believe I've heard that is in the Kama Sutra. No, I don't know what page." She wheeled her chair over to one of the massive file cabinets and pulled out a yellow folder packed with paperwork. "Just tell Mrs. Lemon the gnomes were wrestling," she said, stuffing the report inside. "I'm sure there is a nonviolent solution, but I don't see how the mayor can help. Nevertheless, I'll put it on file immediately.

Now, just listen to me. And listen carefully, please, because I will be speaking bullshit. In two months a U.S. Marshal is going to stride into this godforsaken modular with his cut-rate suit and his Sunday-school way of talking and request that I turn over the keys to the freak show that is the B Squad file cabinets, over which, as of this morning, it is my honor to preside.” They are talkers, the Gelbfishes, speech makers and reasoners and aces of wheedling. Bina’s father nearly talked Landsman out of marrying her. On the night before the wedding.

Jim walked into the kitchen. He was wearing a white towel around his hips and nothing else. His skin glistened with dampness—he had obviously just taken a shower. I stared at him in horror. He nodded to my aunt, my mother, and the two other women. “Ladies.” Then he walked to my silverware drawer, got a fork, took a plate out of my cabinet, walked to the breadbox, speared the steak with his fork, put it on the plate, turned around and walked out. This did not just happen. It did not happen. Aulia looked at me with eyes as big as dessert plates and mouthed, “Wow.” All four of them stared at me.

My assignment as the post’s adjutant and personnel officer (I ended the war a captain) put me in close contact with the civilian bureaucrats and it didn’t take long for me to decide I didn’t think much of the inefficiency, empire building, and business-as-usual attitude that existed in wartime under the civil service system. If I suggested that an employee might be expendable, his supervisor would look at me as if I were crazy. He didn’t want to reduce the size of his department; his salary was based to a large extent on the number of people he supervised. He wanted to increase it, not decrease it. I discovered it was almost impossible to remove an incompetent or lazy worker and that one of the most popular methods supervisors used in dealing with an incompetent was to transfer him or her out of his department to a higher-paying job in another department. We had a warehouse filled with cabinets containing old records that had no use or historic value. They were totally obsolete. Well, with a war on, there was a need for the warehouse and the filing cabinets, so a request was sent up through channels requesting permission to destroy the obsolete papers. Back came a reply—permission granted provided copies are made of each paper destroyed.

Modern society is incredibly complex, complex even beyond human comprehension, if we grant its premises—property, "production for the sake of production," competition, capital accumulation, exploitation, finance, centralization, coercion, bureaucracy and the domination of man by man. Linked to every one of these premises are the institutions that actualize it—offices, millions of "personnel," forms, immense tons of paper, desks, typewriters, telephones, and, of course, rows upon rows of filing cabinets. As in Kafka's novels, these things are real but strangely dreamlike, indefinable shadows on the social landscape. The economy has a greater reality to it and is easily mastered by the mind and senses, but it too is highly intricate—if we grant that buttons must be styled in a thousand different forms, textiles varied endlessly in kind and pattern to create the illusion of innovation and novelty, bathrooms filled to overflowing with a dazzling variety of pharmaceuticals and lotions, and kitchens cluttered with an endless number of imbecile appliances. If we single out of this odious garbage one or two goods of high quality in the more useful categories and if we eliminate the money economy, the state power, the credit system, the paperwork and the policework required to hold society in an enforced state of want, insecurity and domination, society would not only become reasonably human but also fairly simple.

All around the country, at universities far and wide, at workplaces of all sizes and types, at companies that boast of doing good and making the world a better place, there are file cabinets full of the bloody tongues of women. Some are young and tender, others more weathered and battered, but all of them taken from us by people in business-casual attire, in suits and sensible skirts, walking up to us as though what they are about to do is perfectly legitimate, perfectly reasonable, even as they take the long, curving knives from behind their backs, raising them up to strike our faces and our necks. Acting as though this is just business as usual while they disfigure us, and we stand there, letting them, because this seems like our only option.

her proficiency in the Classics would somehow stand her in better stead when opening and closing filing-cabinet drawers and conducting endless searches among a sea of buff-coloured folders. It wasn’t quite the ‘interesting job’ she had envisaged but it kept her attention and over the next ten years she rose slowly through the ranks, in the bridled way that women did. (‘One day a woman will be Prime Minister,’ Pamela said. ‘Maybe even in our lifetime.’) Now Ursula had her own junior clericals to chase down the buff folders for her. She supposed that was progress. Since ’36 she’d been working in the Air Raid Precautions Department. ‘You’ve not heard rumours then?’ Pamela said. ‘I’m a lowly squaw, I hear nothing but rumours.’ ‘Maurice can’t say what he does,’ Pamela grumbled. ‘Couldn’t

We’ve worked together for years, and I don’t even know your favorite food.” That was a lie. I knew she loved sushi because it was neat and easy to eat on the go. I knew she preferred double cheeseburgers when she was on her period and steak, medium rare, at client dinners unless her client was vegetarian, in which case she ordered soup and salad. She liked her wine white, her coffee black, and her gin with a splash of tonic. I knew all of these things because despite her assumption that I paid attention to no one except myself, I couldn’t stop noticing her if my life depended on it. Every detail, every moment, all filed and categorized in the Sloane cabinet of my mind. I would never tell her any of that, though, because if there was one thing sure to send Sloane Kensington running, it was the possibility of intimacy.

arrived in Cambridge, and made an appointment to meet the formidable Krister Stendahl, a Swedish scholar of fierce intelligence, now to be my first adviser. We met in his office. I was nervous, but also amused that this tall and severe man, wearing a black shirt and clerical collar, looked to me like an Ingmar Bergman version of God. After preliminary formalities, he abruptly swiveled in his chair and turned sternly to ask, “So really, why did you come here?” I stumbled over the question, then mumbled something about wanting to find the essence of Christianity. Stendahl stared down at me, silent, then asked, “How do you know it has an essence?” In that instant, I thought, That’s exactly why I came here: to be asked a question like that—challenged to rethink everything. Now I knew I had come to the right place. I’d chosen Harvard because it was a secular university, where I wouldn’t be bombarded with church dogma. Yet I still imagined that if we went back to first-century sources, we might hear what Jesus was saying to his followers when they walked by the Sea of Galilee—we might find the “real Christianity,” when the movement was in its golden age. But Harvard quenched these notions; there would be no simple path to what Krister Stendahl ironically called “play Bible land” simply by digging through history. Yet I also saw that this hope of finding “the real Christianity” had driven countless people—including our Harvard professors—to seek its origins. Naive as our questions were, they were driven by a spiritual quest. We discovered that even the earliest surviving texts had been written decades after Jesus’s death, and that none of them are neutral. They reveal explosive controversy between his followers, who loved him, and outsiders like the Roman senator Tacitus and the Roman court historian Suetonius, who likely despised him. Taken together, what the range of sources does show, contrary to those who imagine that Jesus didn’t exist, is that he did: fictional people don’t have real enemies. What came next was a huge surprise: our professors at Harvard had file cabinets filled with facsimiles of secret gospels I had never heard of—the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Philip, the Gospel of Mary Magdalene, the Gospel of Truth—and dozens of other writings, transcribed by hand from the original Greek into Coptic, and mimeographed in blue letters on pages stamped TOP SECRET. Discovered in 1945, these texts only recently had become available to scholars. This wasn’t what I’d expected to find in graduate school, or even what I wanted—at least, not so long as I still hoped to find answers instead of more questions

Southern violence was explored in one of the all-time coolest psychology studies, involving the use of a word rare in science journals, conducted by Nisbett and Cohen. Undergraduate male subjects had a blood sample taken. They then filled out a questionnaire about something and were then supposed to drop it off down the hall. It was in the narrow hallway, filled with file cabinets, that the experiment happened. Half the subjects traversed the corridor uneventfully. But with half, a confederate (get it? ha-ha) of the psychologists, a big beefy guy, approached from the opposite direction. As the subject and the plant squeezed by each other, the latter would jostle the subject and, in an irritated voice, say the magic word—“asshole”—and march on. Subject would continue down the hall to drop off the questionnaire. What was the response to this insult? It depended. Subjects from the South, but not from elsewhere, showed massive increases in levels of testosterone and glucocorticoids—anger, rage, stress. Subjects were then told a scenario where a guy observes a male acquaintance making a pass at his fiancée—what happens next in the story? In control subjects, Southerners were a bit more likely than Northerners to imagine a violent outcome. And after being insulted? No change in Northerners and a massive boost in imagined violence among Southerners.

It was strange to speak forthrightly, after living at Mrs. Bittle’s those years: exiting the bathroom with downcast eyes, sitting at supper while old Mr. Judd piped up with his yellowed news extras. Now it seems we shared a kindred silence, restraining our smiles on hearing that Limburger has flown across the Atlantic. But maybe I contrive this, as lovers reconfigure the days before, with every glance leading ultimately to union. In any event here she is, installed in my dining room. I hated to show her the mail, stored in bushel baskets in the empty spare bedroom. She did not flinch. Grasped each bushel by the handles, marched it downstairs, and dumped onto the maple table one mountain for each month. Bravely she dives in, even before we’ve found her a filing cabinet or acceptable typewriter. (Royal or L. C. Smith.) We shall put the bathroom door back on its hinges, as soon as I’ve cleared its surface of all piles and chapters, and found a proper

The pair of refrigeration units looked like stainless steel filing cabinets along the back wall, each big enough to hold two bodies. “Fuck,” Sam whispered in an awed tone. “It’s like those… um… things from TV. Those rooms where police keep bodies and shit. Can’t remember what they’re called.” “The morgue.” “Fuckin’ right. The morgue, bro. Like the rue morgue and shit.

Information blindness occurs because of the way our brain’s capacity for learning has evolved. Humans are exceptionally good at absorbing information—as long as we can break data into a series of smaller and smaller pieces. This process is known as “winnowing” or “scaffolding.” Mental scaffolds are like file cabinets filled with folders that help us store and access information when the need arises.

These days, there are sheriff squads whose full-time job is to carry out eviction and foreclosure orders. There are moving companies specializing in evictions, their crews working all day, every weekday. There are hundreds of data-mining companies that sell landlords tenant screening reports listing past evictions and court filings.2 These days, housing courts swell, forcing commissioners to settle cases in hallways or makeshift offices crammed with old desks and broken file cabinets—and most tenants don’t even show up. Low-income families have grown used to the rumble of moving trucks, the early-morning knocks at the door, the belongings lining the curb. Families

There was a more personal form of fragmentation that plagued postwar America, too—a sense that all the paper-pushing and file cabinets had divided workers from their creativity, rendering them miserable, isolated automatons.

A folder of files in the cabinet, with some changes, will be new and shining.

In order to function, the people who operate such a system of drawers must be reprogrammed to stop thinking as humans and to start thinking as clerks and accountants. As everyone from ancient times till today knows, clerks and accountants think in a non-human fashion. They think like filing cabinets. This is not their fault. If they don’t think that way their drawers will all get mixed up and they won’t be able to provide the services their government, company or organisation requires.

Memories aren’t kept on some microchip in the skull or filed away in a cabinet somewhere deep in our cranium. Memories are something we reconstruct and piece together. They are fragments we manufacture to create what we think occurred or even simply hope to be true. In short, our memories are rarely accurate. They are biased reenactments. Shorter still: We all see what we want to see.

to a small room. Set up as a home office with computer, filing cabinets, wood desk and two small bookcases, the space was cramped but tidy. One small window looked out onto the darkness. Jason closed the door to his office, took a key from his desk drawer and unlocked the top drawer of the filing cabinet. He stopped and listened for any sound. This had become habitual even in the confines of his own house. That revelation was suddenly profoundly disturbing to him. His wife had gone back to sleep. Amy was sleeping soundly two doors down. He reached in the drawer and carefully pulled out a large old-fashioned leather briefcase with double straps, brass buckles and a worn, glossy finish. Jason opened the briefcase and pulled out a blank floppy disk. The instructions he had been given were precise. Put everything he had on one floppy disk, make one hard copy of the documents and then destroy everything else.

Harvard professor Elaine Scarry said torture “unmakes” the victim’s world, destroying all ordinary meaning. Torture facilities in the Philippines, Syria, and Greece used domestic furniture to hurt people—smash a head with a refrigerator door, break a hand with a filing cabinet. Weaponized, the refrigerator is no longer a refrigerator; the filing cabinet is no longer a filing cabinet. Objects lose their meaning, and with them, meaning loses meaning. Scarry said it’s why our Holocaust awareness particularly attaches to domestic objects: ovens, showers, lampshades, soap. Home is no longer home. The world is unmade.

trying to get their stories filed without getting stuck here on OT.” A few of Sarah’s coworkers glanced up from their screens as she guided Dez and Sully through the newsroom, a couple of the women offering gleeful waves. Dez imagined Sully was a regular topic of conversation amongst some of the staff around here these days. Sarah led them into a large room filled with shelves and cabinets, then through to a row of microfiche machines and a lone computer. Dez eyed the microfiche

I was glistening with health and vigour till I got there. You never felt really glistening in my office. It was on Stuart Street, second floor front, half a block down from Tremont. One room with a desk, a file cabinet and two chairs in case Mrs Onassis came with her husband.

More often than not, the version that one person files away in the inner cabinet is different from that of his or her partner.

While further exploring the first floor of the hospital, the friends discovered a dusty room filled with old photographs and crumbling letters; the room was labeled “Archives”. One picture caught their attention — a group of children in tattered school uniforms, their faces frozen in time. The letters spoke of longing and loneliness, and the pain of separation. “These kids do not look like they were at this school according to their own will. They look very sad, almost disturbed.” Emily said as she looked around, cautious of what may be in the basement of this place. Continuing on the main floor, a second room also had file cabinets in it but had no name on the door. Inside the room was an article from the Mountainside times of a time when the hospital had its own tale of tragedy and despair. During the war, the medical facility had been overwhelmed with wounded soldiers, and the staff struggled to provide adequate care. Rumors circulated of a nurse who, unable to cope with the constant death and suffering, succumbed to madness, killing 3 interns and one patient before being shot. It went on to say that since this incident, patients reported she still wandered the desolate corridors, her soft footsteps and distant sobs haunting those who dared to stay overnight. The war department cited an increase in transfer requests out of the hospital citing the interactions with “the inhabitants” that haunt the place. As the friends explored the hospital's abandoned wards and empty rooms, they could almost feel the weight of the past pressing down on them the whole time. Shadows danced along the peeling wallpaper, and the air was filled with an otherworldly chill and the dampness of a bog. Every creak and groan of the building seemed to whisper the stories of those who had lived and died within its walls. Its decrepit walls and shattered windows bathed in the ghostly light of the full moon.

kidnapping, taking John off somewhere in a bid for revenge. But it still feels too far-fetched, more likely that Leland is just dumb enough to drop by my house unannounced late at night, a capricious move that’s very much in character. And then there’s the file cabinet in John’s office. The top drawer wrenched open, the bottom one still locked. I was in the middle of going through it all when Leland showed up. I need

■ A presentable and reliable automobile ■ Neat and professional-looking clothing that is not ostentatious ■ Office space in your home with a desk and file cabinet ■ Fax machine and computer ■ Office telephone line ■ Smart phone with e-mail and Internet access and all multimedia features ■ Printed business cards and brochures ■ At least a basic website that is

As the 1970s drew to a close, and Commodore, Tandy, Altair, and Apple began to emerge from the sidelines, PARC director Bert Sutherland asked Larry Tesler to assess what some analysts were already predicting to be the coming era of “hobby and personal computers.” “I think that the era of the personal computer is here,” Tesler countered; “PARC has kept involved in the world of academic computing, but we have largely neglected the world of personal computing which we helped to found.”41 His warning went largely unheeded. Xerox Corporation’s parochial belief that computers need only talk to printers and filing cabinets and not to each other meant that the “office of the future” remained an unfulfilled promise, and in the years between 1978 and 1982 PARC experienced a dispersal of core talent that rivals the flight of Greek scholars during the declining years of Byzantium: Charles Simonyi brought the Alto’s Bravo text editing program to Redmond, Washington, where it was rebooted as Microsoft Word; Robert Metcalf used the Ethernet protocol he had invented at PARC to found the networking giant, 3Com; John Warnock and Charles Geschke, tiring of an unresponsive bureaucracy, took their InterPress page description language and founded Adobe Systems; Tesler himself brought the icon-based, object-oriented Smalltalk programming language with him when he joined the Lisa engineering team at Apple, and Tim Mott, his codeveloper of the Gypsy desktop interface, became one of the founders of Electronic Arts—five startups that would ultimately pay off the mortgages and student loans of many hundreds of industrial, graphic, and interaction designers, and provide the tools of the trade for untold thousands of others.

she rose from her seat and crossed the room to a filing cabinet. Dangling from the waist band of her stretch pants hung a bra. One end was caught by the hooks in the knit material, while the other end tapped right above her calf. The bra looked like Old Glory. It flashed red, white, and blue. I didn’t know whether to laugh or salute it. “Mary Lou, you have a bra hanging off your butt.” I don’t believe I’ve ever had to make that statement before in my life.